On massive higher spins in d = 3

Abstract

Abstract In this paper we consider a frame-like gauge invariant description of massive higher spin bosons and fermions in d = 3 and provide for the first time a proof that such formulation does describe just one massive physical degree of freedom with the appropriate helicity. For this purpose we completely fix all the gauge symmetries and show that all other auxiliary components vanish on-shell, while the only remaining highest component satisfies the correct equations. As a bonus, we show that the Lagrangians for the so-called self-dual massive spin-3 and spin-4 fields proposed by Aragone and Khoudeir (as well as their generalization to arbitrary integer and half-integer spins) can be obtained from the gauge invariant ones by the appropriate gauge fixing.